Category: Politics

❝ Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica, a data-analysis firm that worked for President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, over allegations that it held onto improperly obtained user data after telling Facebook it had deleted the information.

…Facebook said, Cambridge Analytica received user data from a Facebook app that purported to be a psychological research tool, though the firm wasn’t authorized to have that information. Roughly 270,000 people downloaded the app and shared their personal details with it…

Cambridge Analytica later certified in 2015 that it had destroyed the information that it received, according to Facebook, although the social network said it received reports “several days ago” that not all the data was deleted.

❝ While it investigates the matter, Facebook has also suspended the access of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories; the academic who created the app in question, a University of Cambridge psychology professor named Aleksandr Kogan; and another individual, Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies, who also allegedly received the user data from the app.

Many big, successful geeky firms pride themselves on high standards, privacy protection. Some are as sleazy as the worst of the creeps populating corporate admin. Going to spend much time online – in a world where the fastest communications and info are Web-dependent – better learn who you should trust and shouldn’t.

❝ We have entered an age of unreason; an American dark age. A major political party has fallen into decay, seized full on by extremists and overrun by racism, tribalism, greed, xenophobia and demographic panic. It is no longer a question of whether their president can ever be our president, and speak to the nation with moral authority. He can’t. His legitimacy is too much in doubt and his character too absent. The only question is whether the majority can hang onto its collective outrage long enough to drive the neo-Nazis, anti-modernists, haters and fear-mongers who have organized under the Trump banner back into the shadows.

RTFA. Read further. Americans of good will and well-educated in economics and politics recognize the criminal liaison between Trump, the Republican Party, and fascist-minded racists.